Being absent in Akademy 2016, this year when starting calling for paper I almost immediately submitted two topics. Fortunately two proposals were all accepted. BTW, this time a young community friend also submitted a topic and was accepted, so I was no longer travelling alone. Plus KDE and The Document Foundation are partners now, being a member of both KDE e.V. and TDF it was my honor to be the bridge between the two important community.
This time the travel was not as twisted as in 2015. We arrived Almeria smoothly and met Lydia in the bus to the hotel! It was a happy time meeting old and new friends and that's supposed to be the fun of having open source conferences.
In this year I had a long and a short talk. The long talk was about customizing Kubuntu 16.04. The way I used to customize Kubuntu 14.04 was almost useless in 16.04, which made me very frustrated. I used to call for help in mailing lists and IRC channels but didn't get too much help. So in my talk, I listed some important issues like the environment variables of XDG menu specs were of no use in Plasma 5, and the configuration structure in Plasma 5 was totally different but no enough documents available. I have to say that, face to face communication is really good because we can see the problems and discuss together. After my talk some issues were confirmed and I got to know the new "look-and-feel packages" way to customize.
In another short talk it was about Calligra suite. In these two years I mainly work on helping the Taiwan's governments to adopt ODF and LibreOffice. Since an important advantage of using open standard is that users will have different choices for software, I hope that Calligra can be improved especially for the CJK issues so that users in Taiwan can have more choices.
In the BoF session I helped Gabriele Ponzo and Xisco Fauli, who were from TDF to register BoF sessions talking about the LibreOffice community and announcing the release of LibreOffice 5.4. I also registered one talking about to form a total solution composed with free software, for public administration in all the countries. Being an excellent desktop environment KDE can and should play an important role in it.
Another important issue I raised in the "Ask us everything" sessions of KDE e.V. board members was the member electing system we are using now. I was elected as a KDE e.V. member as well but these years I keep wondering if it is an appropriate system. Someone apply for e.V. member because he contributed to KDE and would like to get involved more. Why should he get a certain number of current members to agree? Besides, in this system the "+1" scheme is problematic too. I hope that we can together discuss and think about the member system more to improve it.
Though the time was short but I really had a great time in Akademy 2017. Wish to see you all in Vienna next year!
